Saturday, September 06, 2014

Sometimes, a phrase, an image, a reference, a term will
catch one’s eye, revealing – not with the flag-like pomp of a theme, but like a
firefly in the back yard as evening falls – some moment in history, some corner
of the vast dark we call public opinion or the forces of history, which is not
so much lit up as flickered up, unshadowed a bit. The master tracker of such
firefly ideas is Carlos Ginsberg, who has shown how they can twist and turn –
or be twisted and turned – over the longue duree, and how they can be connected,
the historian’s construction being the promise that some living thing, some beat, is actually there. Parataxis
promises continuity, our ellipsis waits for the pencil that draws the line
between dot “a” and dot “b”, we feel the breathing of influence, but not, oh
never, the palpable push of cause.

It is one of those
ideas that I have been toying with ever since I caught it, again, in Nabokov’s lectures on Russian history.
Specifically, this is what tugged at my eye, or perhaps I should say ear –
since I seemed to confront an echo here. An echo of something I had heard
before.

“ In the sixties and seventies
famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and
emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for
the Russian people than all the

Pushkins and Shakespeares in the
world.”

Nabokov here is repeating in
condensed form an argument he had put in the mouth, or rather in the book, written
by his character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift. The book, a mock biography of Chernyshevsky, stamps its
way through Chapter 4 of the book. Although mock is the tone intended, the
prose often descends into mere dismissal and scurillity – it would really be
worth comparing, some day, Nabokov’s pillorying of Chernyshevksy in Berlin,
1937, where much of the book was written, with the Stalinist denunciation of
bourgeois writers, since the choice of insults seem to converge, and there is the
same microscoping skewing and vengeful hewing of the writer’s corpus – in both
senses. At one point, Nabokov makes fun of Chernyshevsky’s physical awkwardness
in the Tsarist labor camp he was condemned to – which even his admirers might
blanch at, this being written at a time when physically maladroit intellectuals
were being processed in labor camps both in Germany and the Soviet Union. In
the Lectures, he informs his poor students that Pushkin was condemned equally
by Tsarist dunderheads and radical ones – which is an argument one could make,
rather easily, about Nabokov’s own judgments (Thomas Mann was condemned both by
the Nazis and by VN).Of course, my argument that there is something of the
Stalinist purge rhetoric in Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s is also making a parallelism
argument – borrowing the moral opprobrium we devote to one to the other. Hey,
we are all human. However, in Pushkin’s case, try as he might, Nabokov can’t
make the parallel lines meet. But such
is the wonder of art: due to a trick of the eye, they can be made to seem to.

This is a phrase from Nabokov has his fictitious author say about the radical’s views of Pushkin: “When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s
poetry “rubbish and luxury””, thus, again, letting the quotation gently drift
there, where it seems to be on the verge of emerging from the pen of
Chernyshevsky or Pisarev but… ends up emerging from the hybridization of them. However,
in actual fact, a quotation is like a kite – it can’t get up into the air
unless there is a solid figure at one end of it. Usually this figure runs
around a bit, works up a sweat, and finally – the kite, or the quote, is aloft.
But not here. For all Nabokov’s love for “divine details”, this quote, in quite
a philistine way, is simply daubed in, and we will decide later who was on the
other end of it. But the Lectures on Russian Literature shows that the plight
of our quote has worsened, and now there is a host of shadows on the other end
of the diminishing of poor Pushkin, who – we are to suppose – is much better
for the Russian people than boots.

This
unattached quotation – how it manages to fly through the literature on Russian
writers during the Cold War era! What is interesting is not only how it varies
in beingattributed to this or that figure, but
how the quote itself can’t decide between Pushkin and Shakespeare. In Marc
Slonim’s An Outline of Russian Literature(which, coming out in 1959, may
have been cribbed by some of Nabokov’s students before he quit Cornell), it is
Pisarev who, in a parenthesis, writes “A pair of boots is more useful than a
Shakespeare play.” In Berdaiev’s The Origin of Russian communism (1937, a
little before the Cold War), the boots are retained, but Pushkin is pushed
aside for Shakespeare: Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are higher than
Shakespeare’ – an oddly phrased quote that attributes a phrase not to an
author, but to an author’s ideas, as though the ideas were also writing
articles and announcing values and appraising boots – no doubt in the same
manner as the nose in Gogol’s story dons a uniform. Leszek Kolakowski takes the
line that we can attribute to Pisarev the
remark that “a pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Shakespeare”
– an expansion of Berdaiev’s sentence,
and making Marc Slonim’s quote look modest. Ronald Hingley, in the 1969 Nihilists: Russian
radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81, dispenses
with the whole problem of attribution by writing that “a good pair of boots was
worth more than the whole works of Pushkin” was a common saying of the 1860s
period. What we have here is a phenomenon that also occurs in currency trading
in a de-regulated regime: equivalents tend to disequilibrium, as one of the
parts inflates in value – which of course brings up the question if the whole
works of Shakespeare are worth the whole works of Pushkin.But I
will be brave and not pursue every question that jumps up in my head. Instead,
I will finish this woefully incomplete collage of quotations with Isaiah Berlin
in Russian Thinkers (1979) who grabs the kite by the tale, or the quote by the
source, correctly attributing the phrase “a pair of boots is in every sense
better than Pushkin” to Dostoevsky, and speculates that Dostoevsky might have
been inspired by one of Pushkin’s letters, in which he wrote that he looked at
his poems “as a cobbler looks at a pair of boots that he has made.” This feat
of quotation correcting occurs in the very narrow space of a footnote, but when
we think of what a lordly career the
phrase has had, it seems to deserve something more.

Friday, September 05, 2014

I am sick to death of the definitional inflation of the word terrorist. Villifying one's enemies goes a long way back, but I think the modern use of terrorist to mean any enemy whatsoever was started by the Nazis, who labelled all resistance to them in the countries they conquered terrorist. Now, they could have called it simply resistance, but such a name would imply that a total project could be resisted. I think that is where the terrorist idea gets its hot air from.In the case of ISIS, the difference between them and the "moderate rebel" groups the West supports is that they aren't moderate, that they are successful, and that they are gobbling up Iraq. These may well be good reasons for the US and its allies to try to destroy ISIS, War is about this kind of thing. But one must be clear about what is happening. For instance, ISIS is not attacking the US, the US is attacking ISIS. When one reads these panic inducing reports that ISIS may strike at US territory, thus ISIS is a terrorist group, I think: no, ISIS, like any group that is attacked by a state, may attack that state back.It should be unnecessary to say that the fact that I consider ISIS another paramilitary group does not mean I am somehow for ISIS, or find its beheadings groovy. But I am against linguistic slipperiness which, in the end, has allowed the US for the past couple wars to skirt around the international covenants and treaties it has signed about fighting war. And, indeed, skirt around the constitutional language that sets up strict procedures for warmaking (and which have been ignored by the political establishment since 1945 - if only americans were as strict constructionist about war as they are about owning handguns!).If ISIS threatens US interests to the extent we have to bomb them, well, lets have a discussion about that. But lets not falsify the discussion from the beginning by pretending the ISIS - unlike, say, the Libyan paramilitaries who we aided in overthrowing Qaddafi - are terrorists. They aren't.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.